Movie review: The Midas Touch

THE MIDAS TOUCH (PG)

99 minutes/**

Now that many top Hong Kong stars have gone to China, Chapman To has become the go-to leading man in Hong Kong movies. While he is successful in some, including Vulgaria (2012), he has also done a number of horrendously unfunny comedies over the past few years. This is among the latter group.

He plays Chiu, artist manager to seven wannabe model-actresses, all of whom look so similar, generic, silly and annoyingly whiny that you can barely tell them apart. It becomes increasingly difficult to sit through their endless grumbling about not looking pretty enough or not getting the limelight.

As the group of girls (played by newcomers Venus Wong, Una Xie, Jie Zhuang... oh, who cares?) continually gets overlooked week after week, Chiu enlists the help of top artist manager Suen (Charlene Choi), who decides to style them into a South Korean-style girl group.

Rather than provide any insight to the unique relationships between the starlets and their managers - which would have been a lot more compelling to watch - the film strings together childish and unoriginal gags that include pillow fights and scenes of men in drag. A few surprising cameos made by the likes of Nicholas Tse and Wong Cho Lam are the only brief redeeming scenes.

Writer-director Andrew Fung is clearly off his game as writer here, given that he has had writing credits on several truly hilarious Stephen Chow flicks, including Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Journey To The West (2013).

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